| Description |
The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett tend to baffle readers with their alienating lack of descriptive narrative, their relentlessly erudite dialogues, and their seemingly anachronistic settings. Compton-Burnett wrote her novel Men and Wives in 1931, during a period in which writers such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were innovatively responding in their writing to the dramatic social changes brought about by World War I. However Compton-Burnett, with hyperopic clarity, confined the setting of her novels, including Men and Wives, to the pre-World War society of her childhood. Despite the era in which she lived and wrote (1884-1969), Compton-Burnett did not include herself among the "Modern" movement--neither as an immediate predecessor nor as an inheritor. Like one of; her characters in More Women than Men, Compton-Burnett might; have said of herself, "'I am not one of those modern people; I always try to seem a survival from the old world.'" |
